Stepping Up the Attack on Green Activists

A remorseless rapist in Hamilton County, Ohio is sentenced to 15 years in prison for beating and raping a 57-year-old woman. An environmental activist in California is sentenced to 22 years and 8 months for burning three SUVS at a car dealership after taking precautions to harm no lives.

The disparity helps illustrates what animal rights and environmental groups say is an expanding Orwellian attack on American environmentalism being waged under the pretext of eco-terrorism.

In recent months, conservative lawmakers, right-wing advocacy groups and law enforcement officials have ramped up efforts to dismantle eco-terrorist groups and their supports. But critics say vague wording in the USA Patriot Act, new eco-terrorist bills and aggressive law enforcement tactics are ways of quashing civil dissent and tainting law-abiding organizations.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is at the forefront of this movement. On June 21, FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism John Lewis said eco-terrorists are one of the top domestic terrorist threats in the U.S., having chalked up some 1,200 acts of eco-terrorism since 1990 totaling $110 million in property damage. Eco-terrorist groups have caused no deaths.

As the FBI works to shut down elusive and decentralized eco-terrorist networks, civil rights groups say agents are going so far as illegally spying on activists. In June, a federal disclosure lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union forced the FBI to admit having collected 2,400 pages of files on Greenpeace, the most vocal critic of the Bush administration's environmental record, in addition to other groups.

In the courts, prosecutors work to convict activists charged with property crimes under vague and harshly punitive domestic terrorism laws. One activist, Tre Arrow, is facing life in prison for allegedly burning three logging and cement trucks in an Oregon forest. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer, in an interview in June, said Arrow's alleged actions are considered domestic terrorism because "it is a systematic attempt to use the threat of violence to instill fear for political or social purposes."

"Animal liberation movements are being demonized not just as whacko or extremist, but also as terrorist," says Steven Best, an animal rights activist and philosophy professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. "A collective insanity is sweeping the nation [and is] no less absurd, outrageous, frightening and irrational than the Red Scare of the 1950s. The USA Patriot Act expands government's law enforcement powers nationwide as it minimizes meaningful review and oversight by an independent judicial body."

Even though existing laws covering crimes such as arson, theft and trespassing are used to charge eco-terrorists, conservative lawmakers in several states are proposing laws that define eco-terrorism as a distinct offense -- something federal law does not do -- and deepen penalties for environmentally motivated crimes.

These states are each taking different approaches. Since 2001, 14 states have introduced laws directly addressing eco-terrorism, according to an association that tracks state legislation. California was the first state to pass such a law in 2003, and a New York law outlaws, for example, clandestine taping of animal facilities, a key tool for animal rights groups. One Ohio lawmaker wants to prosecute eco-terrorists under racketeering laws to let the state seize assets of convicted activists and sue those who are acquitted.

"I believe legislative efforts that brand activists as 'terrorists' are largely aimed at intimidating compassionate Americans from speaking out against institutionalized animal cruelty, such as the abuse and exploitation of animal by the multi-billion dollar meat, dairy and egg industries," said Nathan Runkle, executive director of Mercy For Animals, an Ohio-based animal advocacy organization.